The futility of actions and dumbness of thought

Scene#1

Time- 9:20 am

Venue: Waiting in the queue in front of the elevator of my office building. There are a couple of elevators and the queues for getting in, generally run parallel. So there are about 30 people waiting in total.


Plot: after standing in there for about 10 minutes finally I come at the starting of the queue.

Generally in such a situation, most people keep concentrating on the electronic display by the side of the elevator door, trying to influence its speed by exerting their mental control over it, others, especially of a particular insurance company whose office is just below mine, and those who come with their female/male counterparts, happily use this time in flirting and bitching around.

So as I was waiting there in front of the queue with my heavy laptop bag panting on my shoulders, it was quite a normal scene, until a middle aged woman standing in the same queue as mine walks forward, pushes me and keeps pressing the elevator switch in frustration, probably she got fed up of using psychokinesis!

Seeing this my counterpart in the next queue, a well dressed young executive also starts pressing the elevator switch next to him.


I thought for a second of telling these two geniuses, that these elevators are manned by operators and they know very well that this is prime usage time, infact they have just 1 minute back seen the long queue waiting when the elevator last came down, and they under no circumstances are going to halt the elevator in its way out of no reason, neither is the speed of the elevator going to go up by pressing this switch repeatedly. So the entire act of pressing this switch is futile.

But then something occurred to me- one of the earliest lessons of a subject in B School which at that time I didn’t like much, called organizational behavior. And it said- average intelligence in a group environment tends to come down to the level of the least intelligent member.

Well those fat books weren’t so useless after all!!